Summer is the season for Brazilian Cherries and there are bushes of them all over Brisbane just bursting with fruit. The bright red cherries contrast beautifully against the dark green leaves so they are very easy to spot.  I have seen them along the train line and other public areas.  On a morning walk in December we came across a bush laden with them out the front of Wynnum North State School. Mark had never tried them before and found them quite a unique flavour – they have a somewhat acidic or tobacco after taste. Having grown up on them I  love the taste; I was transported back to the Mountain where we were always foraging people’s gardens for free fruit.

Unfortunately they are listed as a weed on many Australian websites and judging by the prominence of the bush throughout Brisbane I can understand why. This however is one weed we can take advantage of and perhaps help stop its spread by picking the ripe fruit before it is transported by birds and bats.

I decided to make Brazilian Cherry jam. I searched the web for recipes, learning that they are also known as the Surinam Cherry, and adapted a recipe from the Witchy Kitchen.

3 Cups Brazilian Cherries (deseeded)
1 Cup Sugar
3 Tbsp. Lemon Juice
25 Grams Pectin

Hold each cherry over a measuring cup and squeeze the seed(s) out of the fruit. Do this until you have the desired amount of cherries.

In a pan, place the cherries, sugar and lemon juice. Bring to a high simmer and stir. Lower the heat and allow to simmer on low heat stirring intermittently. Do this until you get a jam like consistency (approx 30 minutes).

Remove the jam from the heat and add the pectin, check the consistency by putting some in the freezer to see if it sets. You may need to adjust the amount of pectin you add (more or less depending).

If you are canning, place hot in sterilized jars and cover properly.
Enjoy with bread and cheese.

We have been a bit overwhelmed about what to do with all the clear space and it doesn’t feel like we are making any progress. Mum came up with us in June, which was great. She is an old hand at beating the weeds and gave us some advice on what to do next. She suggested that we start laying down mulch and building some garden beds to work with – so that is what we did.

It is always fun to see what the seasons bring and winter is definitely citrus season. We have a mandarin tree with fruit most of which we lost to the neighbour’s cows, sadly. There are wild bush lemons and a sour old orange tree at the kitchen with ripe fruit – we took a bucket of the lemons to make some lemon curd! The loquats were also starting to ripen and the mulberry trees were budding. The black sapote had lots of fruit on it but they were still green. We picked a couple to see if they will ripen off the tree.

Mackellar Range May 2010

Mackellar Range June 2010

There were plenty of lemons and limes at the farmers market this week. Feeling inspired by the Gourmet Farmer and the 100-Mile diet, and also keen to start filling our pantry, I thought I would try my hand at a bit of preserving. I have been stocking up on jars from garage sales in preparation.

This morning I made a small batch of preserved lemons. There are a lot of recipes online but I chose to use Ottolenghi’s recipe because they added rosemary and chili which I thought would look nice in the jars as well as add great flavour. It was very quick to prepare; now we just have to be patient and wait four weeks until we can try them.

Preserved Lemons adapted from Ottolenghi The Cookbook

6 unwaxed lemons

6 tblsp sea salt

2 sprigs rosemary (more if desired)

1 large red chilli (more if desired)

juice of 6 lemons

olive oil

- Start by preparing a sterilised jar which will fit the lemons tightly

- Wash the lemons and cut a deep cross into each one. You should be left with four quarters attached.

- Stuff a tablespoon of sea salt into each lemon

- Push the lemons tightly into the sterilised jar. Seal and leave for a week

- After a week remove the lid and press the lemons to squeeze out excess juice. Add the rosemary, chilli and juice from 6 lemons. Cover with olive oil, then seal and leave for a minimum of 4 weeks.

I also made a delicious, if I do say so myself, lime tart. Once again thanks to Nigel Slater for a foolproof recipe.

I am a huge fan of the slow food movement and I believe if you take the time to prepare your own food you appreciate it more. In turn you are more likely to care about where your food comes from and to choose food that is high quality, seasonal, fresh and hopefully has reduced impact on the environment. I also think that food is an important way to bring people together, whether through the sharing of gardening tips and produce or swapping favourite recipes. I love it when friends share homemade goodies or something from their garden.

On Saturday we added three new members to our urban farm – Jean, Hazel and Nola. Our feathered friends were rescued from a battery farm just before they would have been sent to slaughter. If you have not already been shocked by programs like Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners about the factory production of chickens then hopefully some information here might convert you. The battery farm we got our hens from sends 10,000 birds to slaughter ever 3 months and unfortunately only 100 were rescued in our batch (approx 1%).

The hens were only 14 months old and because of the intensive way they are raised their egg production has slowed down – chickens are meant to have an average life expectancy of 10 to 12 years. The hens came to us in terrible condition. They were frightened and missing a lot of feathers and their combs were drooping and enlarged from the heat. It is our understanding that the hens were kept in 27 degree temperature and we expect, because they are laying at odd times, that they were kept in extended hours of light (like spending your life in a casino). The first two days we had them they hardly moved; they didn’t seem to know how to walk properly and they kept pecking at wood and wire (a hangover from the cages).

We have been told that with a good diet and some space to range our hens will return to full health and start laying again. We have already received 3 eggs!

We got our hens from a lovely lady called Monique. To date she has saved over 500 hens. If you are interested in getting some hens of your own please at homesforhens at hotmail dot com. If you can’t have chickens then please think about where your chicken and eggs come from. Question your supermarket and farmers market providers and read the ingredients on the packages. Unfortunately there are a lot of hidden eggs in prepared food products (for example mayonnaise and bakery goods) and these typically contain battery eggs. Even supermarket free-range eggs are typically from massive scale farms with hens packed in like sardines. We recommend that you buy direct from a local farmer who you can ask about (or even see) how they raise the chickens, or find a neighbour who will supply you with happy eggs. Moving more egg production into our neighbourhoods will help reduce our reliance on unsustainable and inhumane farming practices.

We’d like to say a big thank you to all of our friends who contributed to the cost of our chicken coop as a wedding present, as well as to those who helped us build it (and more on that in an upcoming post)!

We will keep you posted on our ladies’ progress.

Dad's old house, which he built of stone, mud bricks and glass bottles.

We had a very productive weekend on our property over Easter; it’s amazing what a bit of machinery can do! Steve Hart, a local farmer, came up with his tractor and did some slashing, clearing and road repairs for us. In just five hours Steve widened our driveway and built some drainage humps, and then cleared the whole area between the bamboo and Dad’s old house, pushing out the old garden. I felt quite sad thinking about all of the work dad had put into the garden, rock walls and paths hidden below 18 years of growth that we have now pushed over the edge. The site looks like a big open wound right now but I hope we can create something beautiful that Dad would be proud of.

We had marked out all of the trees we wanted to save, but unfortunately we had a few casualties including a mulberry tree, the tree where my cat Joe was buried, an old grape vine and a Chinese lantern tree. The clearing allowed us to discover a few new trees including an ice cream bean, custard apple, star fruit, and a black sapote.  Also, one of the citrus trees near the new house turned out to be a mandarin.

A lot of the fun of visiting the Mountain is watching what happens over the seasons. This time of year the loquats and star fruit are ripening, and there is unripe fruit on the citrus trees (bush lemons, orange and mandarins), which means we should have some good picking next visit. The black sapote and custard apples have small fruit (we’re not sure when they ripen), and there are remnants of ice cream beans which indicates that they ripen in March.

The Lantana were in full flower, as were the Cassia. We are still and probably will always be battling against these invasive weeds; however, we are becoming more familiar (thanks to sites like the Australian Government’s Weed Identification Tool) and ruthless with them. The cut and poison method seems to be working but I think we need to get better with our timing. Specifically we  need to catch many of these weeds before they go to seed.  There is a weedy legume tree with pinnate leaves (like the Cassia’s, only smaller) which has millions of seed pods falling off of it at this time of year — these kinds of weeds are very difficult to fend off when you only visit every month or so.  Interestingly there is another plant that is growing like a weed up there—coffee!  This is a weed we might be able to live with.

Day 1 – Head to the beautiful North Coast of NSW. Take the Gateway Motorway south past Tweed Heads then turn off at the Tweed Valley Way for  Murwullimbah and Uki. Camp or stay at Uki for a night and do the hike to the top of Mount Warning early in the morning. You will probably be done by midday so you could spend the rest of the day at the beach or cruising around local national parks e.g. Border Ranges, Minyon Falls.

Day 2 – Head to Byron Bay via the Coast (we recommend you stop at Cabarita Beach and Brunswick Heads). Stay at least 1 night in Byron Bay, 2 if you can afford the time, and enjoy the beautiful beaches and relaxed atmosphere. The Top Pub is great for an afternoon bevy and people watching. Make sure you get away from Main Beach. Try exploring The Pass, Wategos, Kings (if you like nude beaches ).

Day  3 – Drive inland through the Byron Bay hinterland stopping at trendy little Bangalow  for  breakfast, lunch or dinner. Bangalow is a small town with lots of yummy places to eat and shop. For a great meal try Satiate or it’s more casual dining room Ate. When you are full of good food take a tour out to Nimbin. For a peaceful nights stay book into Black Sheep Farm or another bed and breakfast in this area.

Day 4 – Drive to the Granite Belt. This will take a couple of hours but it is a nice drive. Book into a bed and breakfast/camp site then head out for some wine touring or a hike at Bald Rock National Park.

Day 5 – Do a spot more wine touring or hiking  in the morning (don’t drink and drive!) and then head back to Brisbane.

Alternatively/additionally you could head North to Noosa, via Australia Zoo,  which also has gorgeous beaches and will be a bit warmer. You could head further still and go to World Heritage listed Fraser Island.

If you don’t want to travel then Brissy has a lot to keep you entertained. It has a great music scene. Some of our favourites music venues are The Zoo and the Tivoli. There are good markets (West End and New Farm to name a few), great museums and lots and lots of good cafes and restaurants.

Below is a link to a map flagging all of these great locations.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=104751528505320966123.00047337b335b6004e729&ll=-27.054234,153.099976&spn=4.309267,6.047974&z=8

After an amazing 10 days in Japan, our heads are still spinning from the bright lights, fast trains and general craziness of it all. We started in Tokyo, then hit the slopes in Nozawa Onsen and finished off with a cultural fix in Kyoto.

The food in Japan was amazing everywhere we went, from the cheap and cheerful Onigiri at train stations, to a big warming bowl of soba on the slopes, to the rowdy tavern atmosphere of an izakaya. There are so many places to eat and as you can see in our pictures, we ate our way around the country.

We were given a great introduction to the food culture at the start of our trip by attending two of Elizabeth Andoh’s cooking classes. Elizabeth is an amazing women with an intimate knowledge of Japanese culture and food. We purchased her cookbook so we will hopefully be preparing some tasty Japanese meals in the future.

Tokyo is a fascinating city. With a population of 20 million people, the city seems to go on forever. It is a great place to explore and people watch. Some of the highlights for us were watching the Harajuku girls on Sunday afternoon and visiting Akihabara with its mashup of crazy manga, technology stores and costumed girls promoting maid cafes. We would also recommend checking out a few of the less touristy areas such as Shimo-Kitazawa; Mark’s friend Chris introduced us to this area and took us to a fantastic izakaya (Japanese Pub/Tavern with food) called Izakaya-Ism. Izakaya-ism was full of people sitting around little tables set into the floor; we had delicious seared mackerel, among other tasty sharing dishes . Another area we liked was Naka-Meguro where we chilled out in a hip cafe/bar called Combine.

After 4 days in Tokyo we got onto one of Japan’s sensational and prompt high-speed Shinkansen trains and headed for Nagano. From Nagano we took another train and a bus (all also prompt and easy to navigate) to get to Nozawa Onsen. We had booked into a cozy little place called Pension Schnee to enjoy a few days skiing and man were we in for a treat. Nozawa Onsen is an amazing little village with lots of traditional houses and bath houses and we were lucky to arrive when it was being dumped on with snow. Our accommodation was at the foot of the slopes so we were able to get up in the morning and ski (well if you didn’t have to hire your skis) to the chair lift. This was by far the best skiing we have ever done. It was topped off by the great food, friendly people and a blissful soak in an onsen (Japanese hot spring bath) at the end of a long day of skiing.

Our final destination was Kyoto, which is a historical city with many gorgeous temples and shrines scattered throughout.  In Kyoto we encountered other reminders of Japan’s history, including Geisha, women in traditional dress and samurai sword shops. It is lovely to get lost in. We spent hours walking around Nishiki (the food market), Gion, Pontocho and other places. Pontocho is a narrow pedestrian street with many nice places to eat where you can often see Geisha dashing between restaurants. We found Kyoto a little harder to crack than Tokyo; it may have been nice to have a local to show us around and discover the pulse.

We became quite fond of Japanese beverages, mainly Shochu and Sake. Sake is made only from rice and the quality varies depending on the quality of the rice and water used. Shochu, however, can be made from a variety of ingredients including sweet potato, barley, sugar and buckwheat; each of these gives a different taste and aroma. I was particularly fond of  “chu-hi,” a shochu hi-ball with soda water and fresh citrus (grapefruit, lemon etc). Mark preferred the more peaty taste of sweet potato schochu (click here for a good intro). We also fell in love with yuzushu (ゆず酒), shochu flavoured with yuzu (an amazing Japanese citrus), and if we could get a tree here in Australia we would be making our own!!

(We’ve been married for almost four months, but thought we’d better finally post about the big day. What better time to do it than Valentine’s Day!)

We had an amazing and beautiful wedding on the beach at Cutter’s Reserve, Point Lookout on North Stradbroke Island, Queensland on October 25, 2009. We had 70 guests including our parents, most of Lakshmi’s aunts and uncles, and many of our great friends from around the globe.

We made it a whole weekend of fun activities including a surf lesson on Friday (unfortunately the surf was flat that day!), barefoot bowls on Saturday, and our wedding and reception on Sunday afternoon.

We couldn’t have asked for better weather, as you can see in the photos. Our guests told us that they even saw dolphins and a manta Ray swim behind us during the ceremony!

We had a delicious reception dinner at Amis Restaurant, and our delectable cake was made by our talented friend Krista.

Thanks to everyone who came and made it an unforgettable day. Click the link to see all the photos!

[Update: this post is a bit old, but I thought we should add some photos!]

It has been so long since we have posted. In between our last posts we have bought a house and got married!

On August 28th we moved into our beautiful new home in Wynnum, a suburb of Brisbane on Moreton Bay. Our house is a Queenslander “worker’s cottage” built in 1937 (so we were told, but we haven’t found documentation of the date yet). We love the Queenslander style — raised on stumps to increase airflow (and protect from floods and termites), with wide verandahs, high ceilings, and timber floors and walls (often called “VJ” or vertical joint walls).

We are now settling into our new digs and starting to get our fingers dirty. Since we have moved in we have put in a small vegetable patch, added a big black compost bin and arranged a garden waste collection service. We still have our Bokashi bins and are using all the juice to fertilize out garden. We then tip the contents into our garden compost bin.

We are enjoying the learning process of growing a garden. My mum helped us to dig and plant it the first month we were here (September). Unfortunately the soil did not look very healthy and there were hardly any worms so we added compost and mulch. We planted zucchinis, lettuce, rocket, spinach, aubergines, cucumbers, nasturtiums, green onions and herbs (mint, coriander, thyme and basil).

The Zucchini plant took off and we got a nice crop of rocket and lettuce leaves. Unfortunately none of the other vegetables survived. Also despite the zucchini plant looking healthy, the fruits were not maturing because nothing is pollinating them. Zucchinis need to be pollinated, otherwise they just shrivel and die. Mark hand-pollinated one fruit and it did really well. We have ordered some Sugar Bag Bees to try to overcome this. We did eat a couple of baby ones with the flowers still on in a Thai chilli basil duck stir fry. They were delicious!

It was quite deflating to see new shoots of nasty weeds sprouting where we have been working relentlessly to clear. I was reminded of Michael Pollan’s brilliant  book “The Botany of  Desire” in which he discusses the Greek mythological gods Apollo and Dionysus—Apollo symbolizes the desire for order and control, while Dionysus embodies madness and mayhem. I think the Mountain is likely to always lean toward madness, no matter how hard we try to bend it to Apollo’s rule.

We are slowly learning the names of some of these nasties, often with groans of “oh no, you have that” from the locals.   Madeira Vine, introduced from South America, grows  aerial rhizomes (which look like cat turds) from its vine and drops them to sprout new growth.  Unfortunately we didn’t know about this reproductive capability and pulled a ton of this vine down from the trees.  After seeing how rapidly new growth spread from the dropped tubers, in the future we will instead cut and poison the vines from the ground up.  To combat the already dropped rhizomes we raked up an entire top layer of mulch and burned it in a bonfire.

We have written here before about Lantana and how much of it there is on our property.  Well, in comparison Madeira Vine makes dealing with Lantana seem like a walk in the park.  Nevertheless, we continue to pull up and cut and poison a lot of Lantana.  Another very prevalent weed is the Honey Locust tree which has big seed pods and grows among the Lantana and seems to spread very fast and crowd out other plants.  The cut-and-paint poison method seems to kill these trees but we have to expect that the seed pods they drop will give us more grief.

We kept asking ourselves, “why can’t some of these new shoots be beneficial native plants”. Our sole consolation was to find a peach tree, which we had presumed dead after removing a thick cover of vines last fall, covered in delicate pink blossoms as if to say “thank you”.

July 2009 MacKellar Range Visit